Unionism is on the back foot – yet again

Posted By: February 24, 2018

IRISH CONGRESSIONAL BRIEFING

Distributed by Irish National Caucus

“A strong leader can get away with being a step in front of their party. But Mrs. Foster is anything but a strong leader, as demonstrated by the speed and manner with which matters at Stormont unraveled last week….If Unionism is to have a long future, then it will need to find confident leaders who can articulate a vision fit for a modern, shared society without begrudgery and casual offensiveness.”

William Scholes.Irish News. Belfast. Friday, February 23, 2018

A casebook of mysteries has emerged from the soutane recesses of the square brackets débâcle.[As in this square bracket, the text of the Stormont Agreement, or lack thereof, was peppered with square brackets. Hence Mr. Scholes’ lampooning-use of square brackets in next paragraph].

These include questions over Arlene Foster’s [lack of] leadership and the length of time it will take the DUP to [inevitably] sign up to the [modest] Irish language commitments it has [already] negotiated with Sinn Féin, and thus restore devolution.

Sinn Féin must also explain why, having droned on and on and on for month after month about “no return to the status quo”, it was prepared to embrace a deal that appeared to offer such little progress on so many of its cherished issues.

Instead of Sinn Féin being on the back foot because it was going to buy tickets to a status quo tribute act, it is the DUP – as well as unionism more widely – that finds itself rocked back on its heels.

This is, in part, because of internal DUP dynamics and Mrs. Foster’s own cloddishness. Once again, she has approached a political problem with the delicate poise and quiet self-control of a sideboard stuffed with crockery being shoved down several flights of stairs

But it also reflects a wider malaise in DUP-dominated Unionism and the way it has shaped itself and the political landscape in recent years.

A siege mentality and an increasingly parochial outlook are its hallmarks as the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, mere weeks away, limps into view.

There is a fixation with defining Britishness in a very particular way that is not only alien to the British on ‘the mainland’ but also, with its orange and green, them and us narratives, corrosive to citizens in Northern Ireland.

Even when it has got a good deal for its voters, as the latest sensible compromise appears to have been, 21st century Unionism is incapable of talking about it without looking like it is sucking a lemon or sounding like the end of the Union is nigh. It is just a coincidence that ‘nigh’ is Ulster-Scots for ‘now.’

Mrs. Foster’s latest difficulties show a more worrying development, not least for her own position.

Struggling to persuade your voters about the merits of the latest deal with the Shinners is one thing, but being embarrassed into denying its very existence by your own MLAs and MPs is a shambles of an altogether different, bewildering order.

The specter of internal party opposition is one with which Mrs. Foster ought to be very familiar.

While in the UUP, she was among those who felt that David Trimble had sold out Unionism through his support for the Good Friday Agreement.

With others, she eventually left the UUP in 2003, though not before helping sow the seeds of Trimble’s demise, that party’s decline and confirming the notion that Unionists don’t know a decent political deal when they see one.

Fast forward, and it is Mrs. Foster who now finds herself in the isolated position of being out of step with much of her party because of the Irish language elements to the [draft] deal she negotiated with Sinn Féin.

A strong leader can get away with being a step in front of their party. But Mrs. Foster is anything but a strong leader, as demonstrated by the speed and manner with which matters at Stormont unraveled last week.

The gap between her own public pronouncements on the Irish language, crocodiles included, never mind those of comic turns like Gregory Campbell and Sammy Wilson, and the reality of the negotiations with Sinn Féin was simply too wide to be credibly bridged.

And at no time had the DUP signaled to its voters what it was prepared to agree to on the Irish language.

Nor had it the wit to indicate that it was cooking up a good deal of Unionism and that Sinn Féin had dropped its red lines.

When, for example, did you last hear Sinn Féin say Mrs. Foster couldn’t be the first minister or agitate over RHI and Nama? And where has reform of the Petition of Concern and same-sex marriage gone?

After meeting Theresa May on Wednesday, Mrs. Foster again insisted that she was not contemplating an Irish Language Act with impressive sincerity for someone who just days earlier was, erm, contemplating an Irish Language Act.

The consensual optimism of the Trimble era has been obliterated. If Unionism is to have a long future, then it will need to find confident leaders who can articulate a vision fit for a modern, shared society without begrudgery and casual offensiveness.

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